We've been using Valgrind to find memory leaks in my open source project; it caught a few subtle memory leaks which we didn't catch in our six months of testing by hand.
I've been very pleased with it.
I can not comment on how easy it is to use because other developers on the team have been using it instead of myself.
I understand where you are coming from. My current mozilla annoyances:
You lose the contents of a form if you accidently hit the back button or the backspace key (or have your four-year-old neice throw something at the keyboard which does the same thing); hitting forward again restores the contents of the form in Internet Explorer. It does not restore the contents of the form in Mozilla.
I just lost ten minutes of work today because the Mozilla developers can not even get something basic like this right. Yes, I will submit a bug to bugzilla when I calm down enough to do so; I just lost the work under an hour ago so I am still rather pissed.
Real-world example of the DHTML problems. Go to www.gatorade.com , and click on one of the product listings. There is some DHTML which causes a scroolbar to appear in the middle of the screen so that one can scrool down to see all of the products listed. This scrollbar does not work in Mozilla; it does work in IE.
Mozilla's advantages are that it has pop-up surpression technology, and that it is available for Linux and other non-mainstream desktop OSes.
If I want to express the fact that www.company-name.com should be the same as www.company.com
Keep in mind that BIND does not permit the other desired case: Having company-name.com be a CNAME which points to company.com.
Any piece of data you need to associate with a DNS domain name should be expressible with the DNS protocol.
I understand the rational behind this: Minimize the effort people have to do to set up a domain.
And it worked with the set up people had in the 1980s when new domains were rare enough that people changed zone files by hand to add the domain in question.
All of this indirection was designed before changing your IPs with the upstream simply consisted of filling out a web form to change the IPs. The indirection hurts more than helps these days; it makes making a secure DNS server harder, and it also makes DNS less reliable. People with domains in foreign contires (where they want both, say, example.com and example.be) in particular suffer because of glueless NS referrals.
Additionally, the indirection does not help in the case a large ISP with a zillion domains to manage. They need to add the new domain to/etc/named.conf; the most common feature people request with my DNS server is to have a way of adding a domain without needing to change anything with the DNS server. The other common request is SQL support; this is just another way of asking for the same thing.
The solution, which only exists in my imagination right now, is to have metadata about DNS be transferred using something besides DNS.
Variable substitution in zone files, for example.
Like I say, I'm just talking out of my butt until I actually implement something; you are right until I have implemented something better.
It is attitudes like this that cause Linux to have poor support for the majority of modems out there today. There is not a laptop out there whose internal modem is not a winmodem.
More to the point, winmodems are very useful when someone wants to spend only $300 to build a computer.
This meme that the Linux community has about Winmodems is not healthy.
You are right that DNS needs to be replaced. Among other reasons, because it was poorly designed and engages in a process far too complicated for simple name lookup, all in the interest of making life as easy as possible for lazy bureaucrats in charge of various domains in the mid-1980s.
The compression format is very poor. The fact that NS and MX referrals use names instead of IPs. The existance of CNAME records. Glueless NS referrals. All of these are things which a well designed DNS replacment would not have.
Now, before I continue, I feel very strongly that it is far easier to gripe about something which exists right now than to design something better to replace it. I will say nothing more until when and if I have designed and implemented a better replacment.
Back up that statement with an actual law or court case. If you aren't selling the product, and you aren't acting maliciously, you're not responsible.
I second that statement. I think this whole idea that putting code in the public domain makes you more vulnerable to lawsuits is nothing more than an urban legend.
I think, quite frankly, it will actually help a lawsuit because a court can more readily understand "I put it in the public domain" than they can understand "I licensed it under the GPL, which is in this 20-page document here" or "I licensed it under a BSD license".
I will tell you what happens when a court case sees something like the GPL. The judge glazes their eyes over this rather bizarre complex maze of legaleze. It weakens the "I gave it away" argument; the other side can now say "You call a piece of legaleze that long 'giving it away'?"
Lawyers like seeing big legalese in software packages because they would get paid less to say "Just put it in the public domain". The FSF likes seeing big legaleze in software packages because they have a particular anti-corporate agenda (which, BTW, I mostly agree with). Slashdotters like seeing lots of legaleze because they can pretend they are smart by pretending to interpret the legaleze.
I am, of course, willing to be proven wrong. Please cite court cases and damages paid. Please, if possible, put the court decisions in question on line.
OK, who is the idiot who moderated this troll up? It is obvious that this person is just trolling for flames. Time to make this account have negative karma so that this troll needs to create a new account to spew his junk with.
The chair really belongs in a museum. It would really be a shame if some private collector snatched it up somewhere and put it in his rec room to never see the light of day again.
Back in 1992, the Smithsoniam, in fact, had a Star Trek exhibit. Among other things, they had the origial navigation panel (the one Sulu would sit at). It was in pretty bad condition; looking at it live, it looked a lot more cheaply built than it ever did seeing it on the show.
I don't remember seeing the captain's chair at the exhibit.
Given that there is and has been PLENTY of information on the NTLM-over-HTTP authentication process, it is inexcusable for a 1.0 browser to not have support for this protocol.
You seem to be rather ignorant of how software libre works. The way proprietary software works is that new features are added when enough people complain that the feature is not added.
The way software libre works is that a new feature is added when someone submits a patch which implements the feature in question.
If this particular feature is important to you, please start coding.
You have already found the documentation which describes how this particular authentication works. That is a good start.
Now, if you have a patch which implements this feature and the Mozilla development team isn't taking the patch, that is a different story.
And, oh. Is there any particular reason you are not directly nor indirectly sharing your real name with us? When people start using anonymous IDs like "gblues", instead of their real names, that makes me thank that such people are engaging in actions which they are not accountable for.
Some non-mainstream outfits provide this kind of service. TV Azteca allows people to watch streaming versions of their telenovelas and other content they generate for a nominal fee, for example.
This is never what software libre stood for
on
Live from Iran, Film88
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Since there is yet another Slashdot stoty about how to obtain copyrighted content without authorization, I think I should clarify something here.
There a a big difference between the philosophies of the software libre movement and the philosophies of people who copy files without the copyright holder's authorization.
Software libre is not about this. Yeah, RMS rants about how it would be nice if copyrights did not exist, but I don't think he would want to be in such a world. I do not think I would want to be in such a world myself. There is content out there that down right takes a lot of money to create. Movies. Music that uses an orchestra or session players. Video games. Content that would not exist in a world without copyrights.
Now, one of the things I love about the internet is that there is a lot of really great content out there which the copyright owners freely shares. mp3.com has a lot of really talented bands giving their music away (it's a shame that mp3.com is a borderline spamhaus; if you give them your email address, even when emailing a band to say you like their music, you end up on mp3.com's spam list). The whole software libre thing is about giving away some excellent software. Many authors are giving away their books. Free home-made movies. And so on.
There is enough free content out there that, dare I say, I do not think anyone needs to download copyrighted content without authorization to have a compelling internet existance. So it puzzles me that Slashdot continually links to "file sharing" programs and to pirates who share content without authorization.
I completely agree that the RIAA and the MPAA have always been overzealous about copyrights. The HRAA was an abomination; it killed the consumer DAT. As an electronic musician in the early 1990s that had to spend $1200 instead of $300-$600 for a digital tape deck because of the RIAA's actions, I am no friend of their copyright overzealousness.
However, the path of civil disobediance is not to copy movies en masse so that people can view movies without paying for them. Such self serving actions do not look very good in the harsh light of the courtroom; I think such activities contribute to the large number of lost court cases which are trying to fight the abomination called the DMCA.
If you wish to fight the DMCA and the even more evil children of the DMCA, it is important to make a clear stand that we are against this because the law is wrong, not because it gets in the way of having our pirated content fix.
Some people would rather concentrate on being productive than play musical operating systems.
Exactly. I want to be productive with whatever computer ends up in front of me without needing to change the OS it is running. I couldn't do that if I needed some Windows application to be productive and the computer in front of me was running MacOS X or Solaris.
But the thing that really drove me crazy was that we were expected to use the UNIX terminals in lieu of any Windows or Macintosh laptop that we might have available. In fact, I was asked to give up my laptop because it looked bad for me to have a laptop on my desk and not be using my Solaris workstation
The fact that Sun asked you to do this gives me a good deal of respect for who Sun is and what they stand for. While I have my own issues with Sun (having to do with the fact that Solaris barfs on code which every free *NIX can handle); I respect them for making OpenOffice available, and for striving to make *NIX the standard desktop environment for their users.
Now, of course, if I was your manager, I would let you use Windows, a Macintosh, or whatever else makes you productive. While I do respect people who are able to be productive in a strict *NIX environment more than people who need to use something else to get their work done, I understand that Linux is not for everyone.
As one of the other people who posted a follow-up pointed out, Windows is a real roach motel. You have made a decision to not learn how to use the proprietary tools well enough to be productive with them. As a result, you are stuck using Windows or a Mac to do productive work. People who can be productive with libre software tools and not tied down to any particular OS environment.
I have no problem using a Windows desktop, since the free software tools I use have been ported to this environment. All I need is a Windows machine with a net connection to get something very close to my Linux environment again.
Nor do I have any problem being productive in MacOS X, which is a single terminal window away from being essentially identical to my Linux setup.
Solaris can be made productive by a simple visit to sunfreeware
. Other proprietary Unices have similiar binary ports sites.
Of course, I prefer working in Linux; it is nice to know that I can fix small annoyances like this one as needed. An option I do not have with proprietary software.
Ah, I see it now... Open Source developers continue to demand "respect", and continue to isolate them from actual users. Eventually, Open Source developers will develop only to please themselves.
Nice bit of flamebait there. When I see something like this, the first thing I do is try to find out who is posting this kind of thing; there is certaintly something going on here which is causing you get get your panties bunched up. Don't feel bad about it; I posted the same kind of junk when I was new to the world of open source. We do things different here than what you may be used to. This may be a rude awakening; it certaintly was for me nine years ago.
OK, I went to your web site. I see you run a commercial porn site; the fact that you don't use your real name earns no respect from me, but I understand why you may wish to stay anonymous. Keep in mind that OSS people generally do not respect people who use anonymous identities unless they have good reason to do so. I am Sam Trenholme, for what it is worth, and you can find out a lot about me with a simple Google search.
I am sure that you are probably used to having the right to yell and being very discourteous when, say, your web site goes down. As well as you should have. However, acting like that with OSS developers can very quickly result in a flame war. It probably won't give you want you want; people will eventually killfile or ban you if you continue to behave like that.
Let me make one thing clear: No one is asking you to make your website compatible with Mozilla, per se. One thing that is very important in OSS is that standards are supported. OSS people who write code which does not respect the standards are put to task for their decisions.
It's not like the bad proprietary world of software where IE (and Netscape, before) deliberately breaks the standards and all of the webmasters march to that drum.
What we believe in is having how, say, a web broweser renders web pages, be well documented, and that good programs follow those documents. For example, the AWK programming language has a POSIX standard which describes how an AWK interpreter should behave. When GAWK added some features which were not part of the standard,
they got some heat for this. While the consensus was that the GAWK developers have a right to add features like there, there was some concern that this was a non-standard addition.
Likewise, we feel that it is important that there should be standards which web browsers follow which allow webmasters to write a single page which will render correctly on all standards-complient web browsers. We're not asking you to kiss our posteriors; we are just asking that you understand how we work and think, and how much effort it is to do what we do, effort we generally do not get paid for.
if they want their product to succeed, then they need to listen to the users.
Open source is in a very difficult transition right now; we are finally getting to the point where 1.0 versions of applications for "end users" are coming out. Open source has a very long history of writing applications for computer experts; the programs have been meeting the needs of those users very nicly for quite some time now. There is going to be a lot of tension in this transition to open source applications "for the rest of us"; it is just as much a shock to the values of veteran OSS devlopers as it is a shock for end users who are used to having someone to yell at when something goes wrong.
- Sam
I like the name they gave Dormer
on
Review: Insomnia
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I like the name they gave Dormer; dormir means "To sleep" in Spanish (and probably other romance languages). Rather appropriate since one significant plot point was the Dormer could not sleep.
I wonder if the Norweigan original does a similiar wordplay on the cop investigator's name.
- Sam
Re:My problem with Moz. is the way they handle bug
on
Moving towards Mozilla 1.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Since I have not looked at the archives for what has happened, I can not comment definitely on what you say in your particular situtation. I can, however, say that the respect an Open Source coder gets also gives them the responsibility to act in a dignified manner. For example, a good number of people on Slashdot are a good deal less polite than Dan Bernstein is; however they do not get the kind of rap Dan gets because he is important enough in the open source hierarchy that his actions are much more closely scrutinized.
There is a certain responsibly that the open source devloper has to listen to bug reports and comment on them in some way. My experience with posting bug reports for Mozilla is that they are very professional and responsive. I said "opening this page crashes Mozilla", and very quickly got alot of "works for me" replies from the developers. I was using the last M## snapshot and they made it clear that the snapshot was out of date and that a lot of work had since been done correcting those kinds of bugs. Yes, they were a bit short with me when they explained that I need to use a CVS snapshot if I am going to report bugs, but they exaplined to me what I was doing wrong.
As for features not being implemented, there are a lot of factors at play here. One is that any open source project does not have enough developers to implement all of the features the users want. Another is that implementing too many features without having a strong foundation to build the features on can cause the code to quickly become unmaintainable. Another is that, form the OSS coders point of view, it looks like people saying "We want lots of shiny toys" where the people asking for the shiny toys don't understand what it takes to make the shiny toys a reality. Getting a 1.0 release out which is stable is far more important right now; the general consensus at this point is that Mozilla was over-ambitious and took far too long to finally reach 1.0.
OSS development just does not work under the rules of a consumerist culture. It's not about shiny toys. It's about learning to become very, very good at something and sharing that skill with the world.
In the consumerist point of view, going to a foreign country consists of reading a tourbook and going to all of the well-trodden "tourist attractions" and bragging to ones friends that one saw the Eiffel tower. Learning a foreign language is strictly optional. They only people this tourist sees, in general, are the overtly pushy salesmen trying to sell them useless trinkets.
Compare that to a more "hacker" (I mean hacker in the positive meaning, not the consumer-driven 'they are trying to break in to a computer' meaning) way of travelling to a foreign country. First, the hacker goes to a lot of effort to learn the foreign language for the country in question before entering the country. One, perhaps two years, of schooling in the language. Next, the hacker goes to some effort to talk to the people in the country in question in their language. Since the hacker has gone to a lot greater effort to learn things and apply their knowledge, their experience in the country is far more rewarding, allowing them to make many more friends and see many more things than the consumerist too lazy to learn the foreign language.
This isn't a hypothetical analogy. When I was in México, I noticed that the people who knew English and were trying to get me to buy things were downright offended when I spoke to them in Spanish. They knew that my Spanish was good enough that I could experience México without needing to buy their wares. I was able to get high-quality hotel rooms at a fraction of a cost of the hotel rooms english-language tour guide books hawk. I made a lot of friends who I still email in Spanish with to this day.
Just as the English-speaking vendors are offended by the hacker that can actually (somewhat) speak the local language, Bill Gates does not like a world where computer users are empowered because they have gone to some effort to learn how things actually work, allowing them to use solutions which are not controlled by him.
I hope I am not coming off as elitist here. What I am saying is "If you want something meaningful, you will have to work hard to get it". Something sometimes forgotten in today's consumerist world. I had no idea just how hard it would be to write even a small open-source program until I started actually doing. I very quickly developed an incredible respect for what people like Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds, and Alan Cox do. Once you understand this, I hope you can see why we sometimes act "elitist" from a consumerist point of view.
Man, that rant was far too long.
- Sam
Re:My problem with Moz. is the way they handle bug
on
Moving towards Mozilla 1.0
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Gave up on the idea of submitting bugs after being flamed on (and then apparently banned from) the NNTP server just for arguing (as civilly as this post) that removing certain features was highly undesirable from a user's POV.
As someone who has banned people from the software devlopment list from my own open-source project, I think it may help you to understand why open-source developers sometimes do this.
People often times fail to understand that an open source project is different from a commercial project. In any releation where one person is paying another person, there is an implied releationship where the person paying the money does not have to respect the person whom they are paying. The person with the money can be pretty irrespectable and still act in a socially acceptable manner. The recipient, after all, is getting paid.
People who are used to using commercial software approach open source software in the same manner. They join a NNTP server or a mailing list for the project in question. They start ordering around the open source software devlopers, tell them what features the program must have. They don't say "please"; they certaintly don't give the open source devloper an ounce of respect. They act as if they were paying the free software developer. But they aren't.
This kind of person gets rather flustered when they realize that the releationship between an open source devloper and a user is different than the one between a customer and a company. The open source developer is, in the hierarchy of computer geeks, higher up on the ladder than an end user who can't code is. The sooner the end user understands this, the sooner they can treat the developer in a way which will not result in them getting flamed and banned.
People write software and give it away for a number of reasons, of course; but one main motivation is to obtain respect. The more open source projects one has worked on and finished, the higher the person is in the strange pecking order of the world of free software. Make enough code, and you too can be a demigod like Larry Wall, RMS, Linus Torvalds, or Dan Bernstein. Even if you are not a demigod, saying "I am a developer for this project" where the project is well known will cause you to commanded more respect.
It's simple. Respect the developer, and they will respect you. Don't respect them, and they will not respect you. Once you understand this, you are on your way to having your bug reports being acted on. Pretty soon, you will be patching; if the patch is good, you will gain more respect from the developers. Eventually, an open-source project will call you and you will respond to the call.
I can see this kind of technology making laptops smaller; without needing an LCD display, all one has to do is have a keyboard (which can fold up) and a jack for hooking up the glasses with the MEMS display to.
Enhanced "security". Useful for such high-security applications such as looking at your p0rn in the same room as your wife without her knowing.
3) Blakes 7 predicted this technology back in 1978 (do a search for "walkman" on that page). Can anyone cite an earlier prediction for this kind of technology in science fiction literature.
If someone sees something worth scorn, its their right to unleash it.
Agreed. Also, free software devlopers have a right to think that Steve J. Milloy is an twit whose contribution to free software is less than zero.
to have HURD after 8-10 years of development to be nothing more than a crash test dummy kernel is worth a ton of scorn.
You can thank Linux for that. After Linux came out the GNU project devoted most of their effort to improving the userland tools: GCC, EMACS, the shell utilities (sh, awk, ls, md5sum, etc.), and so on. In addition, they made the HURD a much more ambitous effort than it was. Basically, the GNU project felt it was better to get something out that was right than to release something quickly; people could use Linux in the mean time.
Maybe if RMS would get off his moral hobby horse and spent that time putting down code
OK, Steve, not only are you someone who acts like a twit, you are an ignornat twit to boot.
Go back to critizing idiotic junk science. Yes, that is an elitest thing to do also, but at least it is a useful elitist thing to do.
Finally, I do enjoy your junkscience site. Putting effort in to working on that instead of flaming free software devlopers sounds like a lot more useful way to spend time.
Personally, I don't think the sapmmer will win this one. There is case history saying that an ISP has every right to filter out spam they do not want.
Now, this is a case that happened in the US instead of Austrailia, so it may not be able to be cited in this particular law suit, but it shows that courts do not feel that spammer have a God-given right to send their mail to anyone and everyone they want to.
Sorry about the second posting; Slashcode really needs to fix all of the problems it has with semicolons anywhere in a URL
Over on rec.audio.pro, when SACD was first being discussed in 2000, there were some misgivings about SACD. Basically, SACD is trying to directly record to a high density compact disc an intermediate format, which older AD converters used before converting the data to PCM; the format in question is not used by current state of the art AD converters.
I don't think SACD will catch on; RedBook audio is good enough for the majority of consumers out there and it is very hard, if not impossible, to hear the difference between a high resolution converter and a 16/44.1 converter in a double blind test.
As for any form of DRM, the failure of DAT shows that people will not stand for that kind of nonsense.
Over on rec.audio.pro, when SACD was first being discussed in 2000, there were some
I don't think SACD will catch on; RedBook audio is good enough for the majority of consumers out there and it is very hard, if not impossible, to hear the difference between a high resolution converter and a 16/44.1 converter in a double blind test.
As for any form of DRM, the failure of DAT shows that people will not stand for that kind of nonsense.
The only program which doesn't work with the special us_spanish keymap is The GIMP, which, for some reason, doesn't like allowing accented characters when people add text to images.
The ALT+AIMSZ doesn't work on a lot of systems...I will update the page accordingly.
And yes, I agree on the lack of standards causing problems in Linux. Such is the price of freedom.
There is a difference between making the porn in question available and deliberately marketing the porn in question to children.
It is not a question of free speech but a question of boundaries; he crossed my boundaries and violated my space when he typo squatted this domain name in a form that my nieces could easily accidently access.
I guess you don't have kids (nor nieces), so you can't understand.
Actually, people have broken in to Slashdot and made changes to the front page at least twice. The first time, they replaced the front page with a picture from "The Princess Bride"; the second time, they posted a stoy on the front page saying, basically "We broke in and posted this story".
Slashdot Mirror
I've been very pleased with it.
I can not comment on how easy it is to use because other developers on the team have been using it instead of myself.
- Sam
- You lose the contents of a form if you accidently hit the back button or the backspace key (or have your four-year-old neice throw something at the keyboard which does the same thing); hitting forward again restores the contents of the form in Internet Explorer. It does not restore the contents of the form in Mozilla.
- Real-world example of the DHTML problems. Go to www.gatorade.com , and click on one of the product listings. There is some DHTML which causes a scroolbar to appear in the middle of the screen so that one can scrool down to see all of the products listed. This scrollbar does not work in Mozilla; it does work in IE.
Mozilla's advantages are that it has pop-up surpression technology, and that it is available for Linux and other non-mainstream desktop OSes.I just lost ten minutes of work today because the Mozilla developers can not even get something basic like this right. Yes, I will submit a bug to bugzilla when I calm down enough to do so; I just lost the work under an hour ago so I am still rather pissed.
- Sam
Keep in mind that BIND does not permit the other desired case: Having company-name.com be a CNAME which points to company.com.
Any piece of data you need to associate with a DNS domain name should be expressible with the DNS protocol.
I understand the rational behind this: Minimize the effort people have to do to set up a domain. And it worked with the set up people had in the 1980s when new domains were rare enough that people changed zone files by hand to add the domain in question.
All of this indirection was designed before changing your IPs with the upstream simply consisted of filling out a web form to change the IPs. The indirection hurts more than helps these days; it makes making a secure DNS server harder, and it also makes DNS less reliable. People with domains in foreign contires (where they want both, say, example.com and example.be) in particular suffer because of glueless NS referrals.
Additionally, the indirection does not help in the case a large ISP with a zillion domains to manage. They need to add the new domain to /etc/named.conf; the most common feature people request with my DNS server is to have a way of adding a domain without needing to change anything with the DNS server. The other common request is SQL support; this is just another way of asking for the same thing.
The solution, which only exists in my imagination right now, is to have metadata about DNS be transferred using something besides DNS. Variable substitution in zone files, for example.
Like I say, I'm just talking out of my butt until I actually implement something; you are right until I have implemented something better.
- Sam
It is attitudes like this that cause Linux to have poor support for the majority of modems out there today. There is not a laptop out there whose internal modem is not a winmodem.
More to the point, winmodems are very useful when someone wants to spend only $300 to build a computer.
This meme that the Linux community has about Winmodems is not healthy.
- Sam
The compression format is very poor. The fact that NS and MX referrals use names instead of IPs. The existance of CNAME records. Glueless NS referrals. All of these are things which a well designed DNS replacment would not have.
Now, before I continue, I feel very strongly that it is far easier to gripe about something which exists right now than to design something better to replace it. I will say nothing more until when and if I have designed and implemented a better replacment.
- Sam
I second that statement. I think this whole idea that putting code in the public domain makes you more vulnerable to lawsuits is nothing more than an urban legend.
I think, quite frankly, it will actually help a lawsuit because a court can more readily understand "I put it in the public domain" than they can understand "I licensed it under the GPL, which is in this 20-page document here" or "I licensed it under a BSD license".
I will tell you what happens when a court case sees something like the GPL. The judge glazes their eyes over this rather bizarre complex maze of legaleze. It weakens the "I gave it away" argument; the other side can now say "You call a piece of legaleze that long 'giving it away'?"
Lawyers like seeing big legalese in software packages because they would get paid less to say "Just put it in the public domain". The FSF likes seeing big legaleze in software packages because they have a particular anti-corporate agenda (which, BTW, I mostly agree with). Slashdotters like seeing lots of legaleze because they can pretend they are smart by pretending to interpret the legaleze.
I am, of course, willing to be proven wrong. Please cite court cases and damages paid. Please, if possible, put the court decisions in question on line.
- Sam
- Sam
Back in 1992, the Smithsoniam, in fact, had a Star Trek exhibit. Among other things, they had the origial navigation panel (the one Sulu would sit at). It was in pretty bad condition; looking at it live, it looked a lot more cheaply built than it ever did seeing it on the show.
I don't remember seeing the captain's chair at the exhibit.
- Sam
You seem to be rather ignorant of how software libre works. The way proprietary software works is that new features are added when enough people complain that the feature is not added.
The way software libre works is that a new feature is added when someone submits a patch which implements the feature in question.
If this particular feature is important to you, please start coding. You have already found the documentation which describes how this particular authentication works. That is a good start.
Now, if you have a patch which implements this feature and the Mozilla development team isn't taking the patch, that is a different story.
And, oh. Is there any particular reason you are not directly nor indirectly sharing your real name with us? When people start using anonymous IDs like "gblues", instead of their real names, that makes me thank that such people are engaging in actions which they are not accountable for.
- Sam
Some non-mainstream outfits provide this kind of service. TV Azteca allows people to watch streaming versions of their telenovelas and other content they generate for a nominal fee, for example.
It's all in Spanish, mind you. Edgar David Villanueva Núñez may enjoy this content, however.
- Sam
There a a big difference between the philosophies of the software libre movement and the philosophies of people who copy files without the copyright holder's authorization.
Software libre is not about this. Yeah, RMS rants about how it would be nice if copyrights did not exist, but I don't think he would want to be in such a world. I do not think I would want to be in such a world myself. There is content out there that down right takes a lot of money to create. Movies. Music that uses an orchestra or session players. Video games. Content that would not exist in a world without copyrights.
Now, one of the things I love about the internet is that there is a lot of really great content out there which the copyright owners freely shares. mp3.com has a lot of really talented bands giving their music away (it's a shame that mp3.com is a borderline spamhaus; if you give them your email address, even when emailing a band to say you like their music, you end up on mp3.com's spam list). The whole software libre thing is about giving away some excellent software. Many authors are giving away their books. Free home-made movies. And so on.
There is enough free content out there that, dare I say, I do not think anyone needs to download copyrighted content without authorization to have a compelling internet existance. So it puzzles me that Slashdot continually links to "file sharing" programs and to pirates who share content without authorization.
I completely agree that the RIAA and the MPAA have always been overzealous about copyrights. The HRAA was an abomination; it killed the consumer DAT. As an electronic musician in the early 1990s that had to spend $1200 instead of $300-$600 for a digital tape deck because of the RIAA's actions, I am no friend of their copyright overzealousness.
However, the path of civil disobediance is not to copy movies en masse so that people can view movies without paying for them. Such self serving actions do not look very good in the harsh light of the courtroom; I think such activities contribute to the large number of lost court cases which are trying to fight the abomination called the DMCA.
If you wish to fight the DMCA and the even more evil children of the DMCA, it is important to make a clear stand that we are against this because the law is wrong, not because it gets in the way of having our pirated content fix.
- Sam
Exactly. I want to be productive with whatever computer ends up in front of me without needing to change the OS it is running. I couldn't do that if I needed some Windows application to be productive and the computer in front of me was running MacOS X or Solaris.
- Sam
The fact that Sun asked you to do this gives me a good deal of respect for who Sun is and what they stand for. While I have my own issues with Sun (having to do with the fact that Solaris barfs on code which every free *NIX can handle); I respect them for making OpenOffice available, and for striving to make *NIX the standard desktop environment for their users.
Now, of course, if I was your manager, I would let you use Windows, a Macintosh, or whatever else makes you productive. While I do respect people who are able to be productive in a strict *NIX environment more than people who need to use something else to get their work done, I understand that Linux is not for everyone.
As one of the other people who posted a follow-up pointed out, Windows is a real roach motel. You have made a decision to not learn how to use the proprietary tools well enough to be productive with them. As a result, you are stuck using Windows or a Mac to do productive work. People who can be productive with libre software tools and not tied down to any particular OS environment.
I have no problem using a Windows desktop, since the free software tools I use have been ported to this environment. All I need is a Windows machine with a net connection to get something very close to my Linux environment again.
Nor do I have any problem being productive in MacOS X, which is a single terminal window away from being essentially identical to my Linux setup.
Solaris can be made productive by a simple visit to sunfreeware
. Other proprietary Unices have similiar binary ports sites.
Of course, I prefer working in Linux; it is nice to know that I can fix small annoyances like this one as needed. An option I do not have with proprietary software.
- Sam
Nice bit of flamebait there. When I see something like this, the first thing I do is try to find out who is posting this kind of thing; there is certaintly something going on here which is causing you get get your panties bunched up. Don't feel bad about it; I posted the same kind of junk when I was new to the world of open source. We do things different here than what you may be used to. This may be a rude awakening; it certaintly was for me nine years ago.
OK, I went to your web site. I see you run a commercial porn site; the fact that you don't use your real name earns no respect from me, but I understand why you may wish to stay anonymous. Keep in mind that OSS people generally do not respect people who use anonymous identities unless they have good reason to do so. I am Sam Trenholme, for what it is worth, and you can find out a lot about me with a simple Google search.
I am sure that you are probably used to having the right to yell and being very discourteous when, say, your web site goes down. As well as you should have. However, acting like that with OSS developers can very quickly result in a flame war. It probably won't give you want you want; people will eventually killfile or ban you if you continue to behave like that.
Let me make one thing clear: No one is asking you to make your website compatible with Mozilla, per se. One thing that is very important in OSS is that standards are supported. OSS people who write code which does not respect the standards are put to task for their decisions. It's not like the bad proprietary world of software where IE (and Netscape, before) deliberately breaks the standards and all of the webmasters march to that drum.
What we believe in is having how, say, a web broweser renders web pages, be well documented, and that good programs follow those documents. For example, the AWK programming language has a POSIX standard which describes how an AWK interpreter should behave. When GAWK added some features which were not part of the standard, they got some heat for this. While the consensus was that the GAWK developers have a right to add features like there, there was some concern that this was a non-standard addition.
Likewise, we feel that it is important that there should be standards which web browsers follow which allow webmasters to write a single page which will render correctly on all standards-complient web browsers. We're not asking you to kiss our posteriors; we are just asking that you understand how we work and think, and how much effort it is to do what we do, effort we generally do not get paid for.
if they want their product to succeed, then they need to listen to the users.
Open source is in a very difficult transition right now; we are finally getting to the point where 1.0 versions of applications for "end users" are coming out. Open source has a very long history of writing applications for computer experts; the programs have been meeting the needs of those users very nicly for quite some time now. There is going to be a lot of tension in this transition to open source applications "for the rest of us"; it is just as much a shock to the values of veteran OSS devlopers as it is a shock for end users who are used to having someone to yell at when something goes wrong.
- Sam
I wonder if the Norweigan original does a similiar wordplay on the cop investigator's name.
- Sam
There is a certain responsibly that the open source devloper has to listen to bug reports and comment on them in some way. My experience with posting bug reports for Mozilla is that they are very professional and responsive. I said "opening this page crashes Mozilla", and very quickly got alot of "works for me" replies from the developers. I was using the last M## snapshot and they made it clear that the snapshot was out of date and that a lot of work had since been done correcting those kinds of bugs. Yes, they were a bit short with me when they explained that I need to use a CVS snapshot if I am going to report bugs, but they exaplined to me what I was doing wrong.
As for features not being implemented, there are a lot of factors at play here. One is that any open source project does not have enough developers to implement all of the features the users want. Another is that implementing too many features without having a strong foundation to build the features on can cause the code to quickly become unmaintainable. Another is that, form the OSS coders point of view, it looks like people saying "We want lots of shiny toys" where the people asking for the shiny toys don't understand what it takes to make the shiny toys a reality. Getting a 1.0 release out which is stable is far more important right now; the general consensus at this point is that Mozilla was over-ambitious and took far too long to finally reach 1.0.
OSS development just does not work under the rules of a consumerist culture. It's not about shiny toys. It's about learning to become very, very good at something and sharing that skill with the world.
In the consumerist point of view, going to a foreign country consists of reading a tourbook and going to all of the well-trodden "tourist attractions" and bragging to ones friends that one saw the Eiffel tower. Learning a foreign language is strictly optional. They only people this tourist sees, in general, are the overtly pushy salesmen trying to sell them useless trinkets.
Compare that to a more "hacker" (I mean hacker in the positive meaning, not the consumer-driven 'they are trying to break in to a computer' meaning) way of travelling to a foreign country. First, the hacker goes to a lot of effort to learn the foreign language for the country in question before entering the country. One, perhaps two years, of schooling in the language. Next, the hacker goes to some effort to talk to the people in the country in question in their language. Since the hacker has gone to a lot greater effort to learn things and apply their knowledge, their experience in the country is far more rewarding, allowing them to make many more friends and see many more things than the consumerist too lazy to learn the foreign language.
This isn't a hypothetical analogy. When I was in México, I noticed that the people who knew English and were trying to get me to buy things were downright offended when I spoke to them in Spanish. They knew that my Spanish was good enough that I could experience México without needing to buy their wares. I was able to get high-quality hotel rooms at a fraction of a cost of the hotel rooms english-language tour guide books hawk. I made a lot of friends who I still email in Spanish with to this day.
Just as the English-speaking vendors are offended by the hacker that can actually (somewhat) speak the local language, Bill Gates does not like a world where computer users are empowered because they have gone to some effort to learn how things actually work, allowing them to use solutions which are not controlled by him.
I hope I am not coming off as elitist here. What I am saying is "If you want something meaningful, you will have to work hard to get it". Something sometimes forgotten in today's consumerist world.
I had no idea just how hard it would be to write even a small open-source program until I started actually doing. I very quickly developed an incredible respect for what people like Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds, and Alan Cox do. Once you understand this, I hope you can see why we sometimes act "elitist" from a consumerist point of view.
Man, that rant was far too long.
- Sam
As someone who has banned people from the software devlopment list from my own open-source project, I think it may help you to understand why open-source developers sometimes do this.
People often times fail to understand that an open source project is different from a commercial project. In any releation where one person is paying another person, there is an implied releationship where the person paying the money does not have to respect the person whom they are paying. The person with the money can be pretty irrespectable and still act in a socially acceptable manner. The recipient, after all, is getting paid.
People who are used to using commercial software approach open source software in the same manner. They join a NNTP server or a mailing list for the project in question. They start ordering around the open source software devlopers, tell them what features the program must have. They don't say "please"; they certaintly don't give the open source devloper an ounce of respect. They act as if they were paying the free software developer. But they aren't.
This kind of person gets rather flustered when they realize that the releationship between an open source devloper and a user is different than the one between a customer and a company. The open source developer is, in the hierarchy of computer geeks, higher up on the ladder than an end user who can't code is. The sooner the end user understands this, the sooner they can treat the developer in a way which will not result in them getting flamed and banned.
People write software and give it away for a number of reasons, of course; but one main motivation is to obtain respect. The more open source projects one has worked on and finished, the higher the person is in the strange pecking order of the world of free software. Make enough code, and you too can be a demigod like Larry Wall, RMS, Linus Torvalds, or Dan Bernstein. Even if you are not a demigod, saying "I am a developer for this project" where the project is well known will cause you to commanded more respect.
It's simple. Respect the developer, and they will respect you. Don't respect them, and they will not respect you. Once you understand this, you are on your way to having your bug reports being acted on. Pretty soon, you will be patching; if the patch is good, you will gain more respect from the developers. Eventually, an open-source project will call you and you will respond to the call.
Good luck in your journey.
- Sam
- I can see this kind of technology making laptops smaller; without needing an LCD display, all one has to do is have a keyboard (which can fold up) and a jack for hooking up the glasses with the MEMS display to.
-
Enhanced "security". Useful for such high-security applications such as looking at your p0rn in the same room as your wife without her knowing.
-
3) Blakes 7 predicted this technology back in 1978 (do a search for "walkman" on that page). Can anyone cite an earlier prediction for this kind of technology in science fiction literature.
- SamAgreed. Also, free software devlopers have a right to think that Steve J. Milloy is an twit whose contribution to free software is less than zero.
to have HURD after 8-10 years of development to be nothing more than a crash test dummy kernel is worth a ton of scorn.
You can thank Linux for that. After Linux came out the GNU project devoted most of their effort to improving the userland tools: GCC, EMACS, the shell utilities (sh, awk, ls, md5sum, etc.), and so on. In addition, they made the HURD a much more ambitous effort than it was. Basically, the GNU project felt it was better to get something out that was right than to release something quickly; people could use Linux in the mean time.
Maybe if RMS would get off his moral hobby horse and spent that time putting down code
OK, Steve, not only are you someone who acts like a twit, you are an ignornat twit to boot.
Go back to critizing idiotic junk science. Yes, that is an elitest thing to do also, but at least it is a useful elitist thing to do.
Finally, I do enjoy your junkscience site. Putting effort in to working on that instead of flaming free software devlopers sounds like a lot more useful way to spend time.
- Sam
Now, this is a case that happened in the US instead of Austrailia, so it may not be able to be cited in this particular law suit, but it shows that courts do not feel that spammer have a God-given right to send their mail to anyone and everyone they want to.
- Sam
Over on rec.audio.pro, when SACD was first being discussed in 2000, there were some misgivings about SACD. Basically, SACD is trying to directly record to a high density compact disc an intermediate format, which older AD converters used before converting the data to PCM; the format in question is not used by current state of the art AD converters.
I don't think SACD will catch on; RedBook audio is good enough for the majority of consumers out there and it is very hard, if not impossible, to hear the difference between a high resolution converter and a 16/44.1 converter in a double blind test.
As for any form of DRM, the failure of DAT shows that people will not stand for that kind of nonsense.
- Sam
As for any form of DRM, the failure of DAT shows that people will not stand for that kind of nonsense.
- Sam
The ALT+AIMSZ doesn't work on a lot of systems...I will update the page accordingly.
And yes, I agree on the lack of standards causing problems in Linux. Such is the price of freedom.
- Sam
It is not a question of free speech but a question of boundaries; he crossed my boundaries and violated my space when he typo squatted this domain name in a form that my nieces could easily accidently access.
I guess you don't have kids (nor nieces), so you can't understand.
- Sam
Actually, people have broken in to Slashdot and made changes to the front page at least twice. The first time, they replaced the front page with a picture from "The Princess Bride"; the second time, they posted a stoy on the front page saying, basically "We broke in and posted this story".
- Sam